Three handcarts ...... and a mystery location

Once, a long time ago the hand cart was the all-purpose form of transporting goods for people of meagre earnings.

They remain for many immortalized in stories of midnight flits, when for a variety of reasons, it was necessary to leave without paying the rent having loaded up the family possessions on a borrowed cart.

They were favoured by jobbing tradesmen and barrow boys, and could still be seen in great numbers around the city centre well into the last decades of the last century.

I have no idea where these three were, but given we have the name of J.H. ATKIN, it should be possible to locate them using the directory for 1969.

Although part of the sign is missing which means I will have to be a bit inventive in the search.

But I do have the additional information that the firm advertised as “Marine Store & Metal Brookers” which might narrow things down.

And that pretty much is that.

Or it was.  My attempts to find the location, faltered, but John Anthony, he of the recent excellent Gibraltar story* went delving and came up with this.

"The firm was established in 1898, so I had look at the 1939 Register, but only limited success - three mentions J H Atkinson in Failsworth, Salford and Eccles. 

However, Kelly's 1933 Directory has a listing for J H Atkinson, Marine Dealer, 32 Rosamond Street East. Further information records that Rosamond Street East ran between 16 Upper Brook Street and 179 Oxford Road. 

The line of the road still exists, but is now reduced to the status of footpath / shared space alongside the Manchester Aquatics Centre, which is a nice irony. 

Trying to remember the location of the block of flats seen In the background at the right edge of the photo, I think it is / was near Downing Street / Grosvenor Street".

Now that's detective work!

Location; Manchester

Picture; three handcarts, 1969, Courtesy of Manchester Archives+ Town Hall Photographers' Collection,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/albums/72157684413651581?fbclid=IwAR35NR9v6lzJfkiSsHgHdQyL2CCuQUHuCuVr8xnd403q534MNgY5g1nAZfY,

*Looking for Gibraltar in Manchester ........... a story by John Anthony Hewitt, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/02/looking-for-gibraltar-in-manchester.html

So, who did pay for the Chorlton Conservative Club back in 1891? ……… And why it matters

Now there will be some who dismiss the question either because they hold no time for the Conservative Party and others who can’t see the relevance given that the club was sold off around 2013 and was converted it into residential use.

The end of the story, the Conservative Club, 2013

But for over 120 years it was one of our biggest buildings, and with its clocktower was a local landmark.

Added to which, plenty of people will have attended all sorts of dos in what was the Public Hall, along with quite a few well-known actors who performed in repertory companies on the stage of that Public Hall.

And for anyone interested in our history, knowing who helped pay for its construction will help offer up a better understanding of who voted Conservative in Chorlton  in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as providing an insight into Chorlton-cum-Hardy, just as the township was evolving from an agricultural community into a suburb of Manchester.

I have long been intrigued by those who took a risk and subscribed in the new Conservative Club which opened in Chorlton in 1892 and have written about them. *

The share book opened on February 20th, 1891, and between that date and November 7th of the same year, 118 signed on the dotted line handing over a minimum of £1, with some putting down a lot more.

Mary Jane Weeks takes a punt, 1891

So far, I have only analysed the first 50 and they are an interesting cross section.

As you would expect there were a few individuals who bought between £100 and £250 in one purchase, while sliding down the scale there were quite a few buying just one share.  Of those that splashed out, one was the MP, John William McLaren of Whalley Range, another was a merchant and another two described themselves as engineers.

At the other end over a third bought shares worth between £10 down to £1, and as you would expect their occupations were also more modest, with a collection of clerks, shop keepers and craftsmen.

The Register, 1891

The largest single group of subscribers were professionals, including John William McLaren MP, a doctor and architect, three engineer’s and our own Charles Ireland who described himself a “Photo Artist” with a chain of Photographic Studios in Manchester and across the Northwest.

Occupations of the first 50 subscribers, 1891

But there were also plenty of businessmen, some who still made a living from the land, and commercial and traveling salesmen and one who was employed in a warehouse.

And with a few notable exceptions, most of our subscribers lived in properties on roads which were cut between 1880 and 1890.

These were the homes of the middling people who rented or bought properties on Albany, Chequers, and Stockton Roads as well as Oak Avenue and Whitelow Road. There's were the substantial tall semi detached houses, home to many who worked in the city but like the "country feel" of Chorlton, which still had plenty of open land.

Most of the 82 I have so far looked at were men, but there were a few women, and one in particular who gave her occupation as domestic servant.

She was Mary Jane Weeks who held shares amounting to £2. She had been born in 1849, in the small market town of Hathereigh in Devon, and was working as a servant by 1871.

Two decades later she was employed by the Adams family in their house on Chequers Road. Her employer, Mrs. Elizabeth de Worth Adams, had also taken out a subscription for £20 and both ceased membership in February 1900.

It may be that Ms. Weeks followed her boss in to subscribing on the basis that this was a venture worth investing in.

Of course, we will never know.  She died in January 1917 and was buried in Southern Cemetery.

The next task will be to research each of those early subscribers and in particular to dig deeper into their occupations because it has always been easy to categories some of them.

Share holdings of the first 50 subscriber, 1891

So I can be pretty sure Mr. Arnold Bryce Smith was one of our more wealthy inhabitants, for while he described himself as a “Calico Printer” he lived in the fabulously big house called Rye Bank which was on Edge Lane. *

But the jury is out on Mr. William Chester Thompson, of Manchester who listed his occupation as brewer, although as he subscribed £25 I think he was not from the factory floor.

It really all will be down to the detail.  That said some are easier to identify, like Mathew Henry Holland of the Horse and Jockey, Mr. and Mrs. Lomax who farmed the land around Hough End Hall or the prestigious Samuel Gratrix of West Point on the border with Whalley Range.

The New Conservative Club, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1892

Leaving lots of the “middling people” who were clerks, shop keepers and salesmen.

All in all, the register will gives us a fascinating insight into the Chorlton of the 1890s.  Not all the subscribers will have voted Conservative, and some may just have fancied an investment while others may even have just wanted to join a club.

We shall see.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; The Conservative Club in 2013 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, in 1892 from the Manchester Courier, April 30th, 1892. and the cover and a page from the Chorlton-cum-Hardy Conservative Club, Limited, Register of Members, 1891

*Chorlton Conservative Club Financing, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Chorlton%20Conservative%20Club%20Finances

**Register of Members Chorlton-cum-Hardy Conservative Club Limited 1892-96

***Rye Bank, Edge Lane, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Rye%20Bank

"Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep."* ...... Margaret Beaufort ... today on the wireless

Perhaps a controversial  way to sum up Margaret Beaufort the mother of Henry Tudor but then Shakespeare always has the best words.

Lady Margaret Beaufort, 1510

So I shall listen with rapt attention to BBC Radio Four's In Our Time to see how his judgement plays out against the opinion of three experts.*

"Misha Glenny and guests discuss the woman who, as a child bride, became mother to the boy who would eventually become the first king in the Tudor dynasty. Lady Margaret Beaufort (c1443-1509) was twelve when she married Edmund Tudor, half his age, and gave birth to their son Henry when she was thirteen and Edmund was already dead from the plague. 

Margaret Beaufort made it her life's work to protect Henry during the Wars of the Roses, which had begun soon before his birth and, as many more obvious successors to the crown died or were killed in the wars, she pivoted to supporting Henry when he became the strongest contender against Richard III. 

She was to survive Richard III declaring her a traitor and went on to see Henry become Henry VII the first Tudor king and herself become the King's Mother. Outliving her son by a few months, she was then to help her grandson Henry VIII succeed and the Tudor dynasty continue.

With, Joanna Laynesmith, Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading, Katherine Lewis, Honorary Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lincoln and Research Associate at the University of York and David Grummitt, Staff Tutor in History at the Open University

Producer: Simon Tillotson"

Location; In Our Time BBC Radio 4

Picture; English: Portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort by Meynart Weywyck circa 1510 after restoration work in 2023

*Henry VI, Part II, 4.4, William Shakespeare

**Margaret Beaufort, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002s3dq

The class of '68 part 4 widening horizons and lots of fun

Few of us get the chance to leave a past life with all its associations and disappointments behind and start out a fresh.

This is pretty much what I did in the September of 1966 when I walked into Crown Woods School.  I left behind an indifferent five years in all boys’ secondary modern school and one real friend.

And in its place embarked on a two year spree of new friends amazing academic challenges and a new confidence about who I was and where I was going.

But enough of the indulgent personal stuff suffice to say that when I sat down in that room on the second floor with a dozen or so complete strangers I took control of who I wanted to be.  There was no one to judge me against the untidy, loud 11 year old afraid of his own shadow of five years earlier.

Here I could be a new me, and it started with walking to school with a rolled umbrella.  A piece of sheer affectation, silly in retrospect but it made me feel different.

So here in this new place everything was possible.  The school had a confidence about itself and you came across it at almost every turn.

The year before the timetable had been collapsed for certain year groups and various departments collaborated on a drama production “The Price of Coal.”

Set in the 19th century it examined the conditions in which children worked in the coal mines...  And so while the History department set to research the story the English and music departments worked on the production and Art created the backdrop.

Nor was the school alone in sending out a message that comprehensives were just as good at offering exciting and innovative experiences.  Just down the road at Eltham Green School their staff and 6th Form hosted major conferences each year where 16-18 year olds could take part in workshops, listen to leading writers, historians, and scientists, meet and debate with each other and just have a good time.

I can’t remember the theme for the summer of 1967, but Sgt Pepper had just been released and by one of those rare coincidences the organiser was a Mr Pepper, and so much of the two days was filled with the sounds of that LP.  What I do remember was listening to Arnold Wesker discuss with others the cost of the Arts.

Back at Crown Woods there was a regular slot where well known writers were invited to come, meet and talk to us.  I am not sure what Margaret Drabble thought of the meal with four Sixth Formers in the Domestic Science rooms or the level of our discussion but for me this was something totally beyond what might have been possible just a few years earlier.

And that was the point.  At that critical moment in growing up I had the opportunity to discover a whole new set of experiences.  So within a year into being there as a few passed their driving tests and were trusted with the family car we were off along the country lanes of Kent hunting out old pubs or just going the three miles to sit beside the Thames on late warm summer nights listening as the tide on the river banged the barges together.

Then there were the theatres, concert halls and art galleries.  For a pretentious 16 year old in love with himself as well as half the girls in the 6th form I just couldn’t get enough of all that was there to see and hear.

It might be the Old Vic with Lawrence Oliver, Joan Littlewood’s theatre at Stratford East, or one of countless small rep companies performing across the capital.

We hoovered them up as if there was no tomorrow.  Most were fun a few were dire and some still resonance today, like the visit to see King Lear at Stratford.  Three of us had travelled in Crispin’s car and while he settled into a bed and breakfast Mike and I camped for the night by the Avon within walking distance of the theatre.  How we got away with that I don’t know but we did and that is about as far as you get from a small secondary modern school in Brockley to all that followed at Crown Woods.

Pictures; from the collection of Anne Davey, Wikipedia Common

The class of ’68 part 3 a comprehensive school called Crown Woods

Crown Woods wasn’t the only comprehensive school delivering a fine education but it was the one I went to.

So it is a place I can talk about with confidence and a lot of affection. I arrived aged 16 in the September of 1966 having done five indifferent years at a secondary modern school, which if I am honest were a standoff.

The middle years had been troubled and were not happy ones and while I became more settled I was ready to leave. So nothing quite prepared me for Crown Woods.

Here were two thousand students, half of them girls, a building which was less than a decade old and a dynamic, young and talented teaching staff. This was all state comprehensive education was meant to be.

Every night there was something going on ranging from the usual sporting clubs, and music sessions to poetry evenings and the big set concerts and drama performances. And without much effort you got sucked into it. I performed a piece by Pinter with Michael Marland the head of the English Department, joined a mixed bunch hosting an evening of 18th century readings and music in a fine period house in Blackheath and co produced a radio programme on folk music broadcast to the entire school.

It was also the way you were left to take on bigger things. So when after a few months of going to a local folk group I fancied putting on a concert at school one evening all I had to do was ask. The details are now lost in the fog of the past but we did more than one so I guess it all went well. Then there was the teaching. 

Never had learning been so exciting and meaningful before or since. These were the years of discovering Shakespeare, John Donne, and of watching as 18th century literature opened up the history of the period giving it context and depth.

It seems so obvious now but then the idea that before we read the set A level plays of Henry IV and King Lear we would immerse ourselves in the other great Shakespearian histories and tragedies.

Or that in preparation for the prose and poems of Samuel Johnson the 18th century writer we would look at the rhyming techniques of Alexander Pope and gaze over countless buildings of the century to understand the idea of balance and style.

Now for a working class boy who had just about reached his limit with Ian Fleming this was a revelation and a passport to another world.

And it extended out to theatre visits, from the National and Joan Littlewoods’s Stratford East to countless little rep companies across London. We were not just watching live theatre but for the space of two years were living it.

Amongst all this was a gentle assumption that the natural next step for many of us was University, a path which had only been trodden by one distant cousin in our family.

 Finally there were the friends, some of whom have lasted through the last 55 years and of course the girlfriends none of whom sadly lasted more than a few months.

Now I was just 16 and I  guess the cynical will shrug and dismiss it all as hormones. After all this is or should be when we live life in an intense and uncompromising way.

And there is also that creeping fog of nostalgia which makes the past a series of hot sunny days. But on balance for me and I think some of the other class of '68 this was a fine place to spend two years.

Pictures from the collection Anne Davey 

Tomorrow; widening horizons and lots of fun

Chorlton’s palace of varieties …………. part one ....... The Chorlton Pavilion and Winter Gardens

Now there is always more to find out about our old theatres and cinemas, and so it is with the Chorlton Theatre and Winter Gardens, which is an old favourite of mine. *

It was situated just over the railway bridge on Wilbraham Road on what is now Morrison’s petrol station.

Until now I had just one photograph and a few memories from Ann Love’s dad who saw Tom Mix the American film star in a western sometime in the early 1920s

But in the space of a few days there is much more.  I now have a detailed description of what it was like, evidence of its chequered history and the names of those who walked its boards and the plays they performed in.

The actual date of its opening is still a little hazy.  I thought it opened in 1904, but I can be certain it was up and running by1906 when a Walter Broadhurst of 71 Nicolas Road applied for a license to put on shows at the “Chorlton Pavilion adjoining Chorlton Railway Station”, which were followed up by yearly applications thereafter.

In the June of 1907, The Stage carried the notice that Messrs. Levy and Cardwell were performing their “musical Comedy, Little Paul Pry” with an appeal from the managers of the Theatre wanting “Musical Comedies, Burlesques Opera Light Drama” for slots in July into September asserting that “Good Companies do well.  Packed nightly”. **

And that was all to be expected, given that there had been a housing boom in Chorlton which from the 1880s had seen the area around the Three Banks go from open fields to rows of houses, which catered for the “middling people” who worked in town in a range of professional, clerical and entrepreneurial businesses.

These were the very people with money in their pockets who also supported a range of cultural and sporting groups and clubs and will have been a ready audience for a place of varieties.
And this was not lots on a group of businessmen who in 1910 founded the Chorlton Entertainments Ltd.  Their prospective argued “that there was a want of a high-class theatre and place of entertainment in Chorlton a district which is well known”.

To this end they had bought the old theatre for £700 including the “furniture, fixtures, electrical and other fittings, scenery” and “the goodwill attached to the said Pavilion and to the business”

It was an ambitious plan which saw the addition of land laid out as a "Winter Gardens”, which was incorporated into the new name of the Chorlton Pavilion and Winter Gardens”.
And the business plan fully recognised that the site was “in the centre of the populous and growing township of Chorlton-cum-Hardy adjoins the railway station and  is within two minutes’ walk of the Manchester electric tramways [and] within easy access of Moss Side, Fallowfield, Withington, Didsbury, Old Trafford, Stretford, Sale and Urmston, with an estimated population of one hundred and fifty thousand”

Its five directors lived in Whalley Range, Levenshulme and Gorton, and listed their professions as broker, Assurance manager, supply company manager and solicitor’s clerk, and included as one of its auditors Mr. H. D. Morrhouse who was later to establish a popular chain of cinemas of which the Pavilion would later be part of.

But I will close with a description of the newly opened theatre from March 1910.
“It is situated close to the railway station, and is a fine, commodious, and spacious building, standing within its own grounds, which are laid out as gardens; hence the appellation Winter Gardens.  

The building is of corrugated iron on a brick foundation, the exterior being painted a green colour, whilst the entrance is plain, and effective in a white fibrous plaster, with several rows of electric lamps, which gives it a bright appearance when it is lit up.  The seating capacity is a 1,000.

The orchestra stalls and stalls, which are now fitted with tip-up seats, upholstered in crimson velvet, can accommodate 500 persons.  

The pit and promenade seat another 500.  The stage has an opening of 23 ft., and extends from the footlights to exterior wall, 28 ft. 6 in.  There are four commodious dressing -rooms, the ladies on one side and the gentlemen on the other.  

The dressing rooms are spacious and supplied with every convenience and can be heated as required.  

There is a complete electrical installation, and the heating is on the Radium principle.  For the opening week Miss Florence Baine’s company with Miss. Lancashire, Limited, have been secured and on a Monday a house packed in all parts gave a demonstrative welcome to the popular farce, Miss Madge Grey as the blunt Lancashire Lass”. ***

It was also the venue for shows by our own Chorlton Operatic Society and hosted at least one large political meeting by the Unionist Party in 1913.

Tomorrow; dark days, strange stories and its time as our first cinema

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; Chorlton Pavilion and Winter Gardens, circa 1906, from the Lloyd Collection

*Chorlton Pavilion and Winter Gardens, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Chorlton%20Theatre%20and%20Winter%20Gardens

**The Stage, June 27th, 1907

***The Chorlton Entertainments Ltd, Manchester Guardian, January 8th, 1910

Walking the streets of Hightown .... a full century ago

I remain in awe of those writers who can sum up someone in a few simple sentences.

Outside lavatory, Back Percival Street, 1951

Dickens could do it, and today I came across a short description of a Mrs. Poyser which is up there with the best.

It comes from the novel, Magnolia Street by Louis Golding, which was based on the streets in Hightown in Manchester during the 1920s.

These were the streets he remembered from his youth, and in particular the uneasy relationship between Jew and Gentile.

He was born in the city in 1895 to a Ukrainian-Jewish family, described his politics as “strongly to the left” and in 1938 wrote The Jewish Problem which was published as a Penguin Special.*

The Jewish Problem, 1938

The book examines the history of antisemitism, and Zionism, against the backdrop of “The Nazi Horror” and concludes with a final chapter on  “The Future”

But he was also a prolific popular novelist, and I can see why, because his description of Mrs. Poyser  who ran a grocery shop on Magnolia Street perfectly recreates one of those people we have all come across.   “The Jewish women met socially in Mrs. Poyser’s grocery shop, facing the Lamb and Lion.  

There they forgathered in between the washing up after one meal and the preparation for the next; or they called in on their way from the market, to show what a fat chicken they had picked up or how fine a silver hake for chopping and frying.

On a certain Sunday morning in May in the year 1910, there was news and news of the Mrs. Poyser’s sort.  News was, in a sense, Mrs. Poyser’s prerogative.  She weighed it, she sorted it out into bags, she handed it over the counter, along with a pair of kippers or a pound of sultanas”.**

Back Percival Street, 1951

The book, which was written in 1932, had its roots in a series of short pieces he had sent into the Manchester Guardian a decade earlier, describing life from the Jewish side of Magnolia Street which the newspaper had rejected as “nonsense”.

His response was in his own words “to mobilise the Jews on one side of the Street and the Gentiles on the other side and make of them – and this is a thing which has been ignored in references to the book – a study not of Jew-Gentile problems but of the problems which assert themselves when two communities are found in close proximity to one another.  The sort of thing which happened in Magnolia Street to the dwellers on one side or the other are what happened exactly in a street in Belfast in which Orangemen lived one side and Catholics on the other and in Tunis where at the end of a certain area the French lived on side and the Italians on the other”.***

At present I am only on chapter two, with a full 500 pages a head of me, and not wanting to spoil the experience, I haven’t turned to the back, but my spoiler alert, with help from another Manchester Guardian article is that Didsbury features along the way.

Percival Street, Holt Town, 1953

Well, we shall see.

What did intrigue me, was that Mr. Golding was participating in “the formal opening of the new library set up by Messrs. Kendal, Milne and Co. in their Deansgate establishment [to a large audience] “on The workshop of the novelist’s brain”.****

Now that I would have liked to have been part of.

And in a sort of way I should also have liked to have walked those streets in Hightown that he knew so well.

Of course, they have mostly gone, cleared away in the clearance programmes of the second half of the last century.  But there are a few pictures, and in particular the two that appear here.  Both are of Back Percival Street, a small slip of a place which didn’t warrant a listing in the directories and doesn’t get recorded by name on the maps.

But my Facebook friend Bill Sumner, swiftly located the street where I thought it might be beside Percival Street, which was off Waterloo Road which in turn connected Bury New Road to Cheetham Hill Road.

Leaving me just to reflect on those two images of Back Percival Street, which are a powerful reminder of just how tough the area could be, whether you were Jew or Gentile.

Location; Hightown

Pictures; Outside lavatory, Back Percival Street, 1951, m08286 and m08291, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass, cover from The Jewish Problem, 1938 and extract from the OS map showing Percival Street in Holt Town and surrounding streets

* The Jewish Problem, Louis Golding, November 1938, reprinted, November 1938, and January 1939

**Magnolia Street, Louis Golding, 1932

***The Making of a Novel - Mr. Louis Golding and “Magnolia Street”, Manchester Guardian, March 9th, 1935

****Ibid The Making of a Novel